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It's baffling and regretful that the recent attention online about the Religious Left has insufficiently mentioned the prescient Dispatches from the Religious Left written four years ago and now more relevant than any time since its publication.

There is currently a lot of noise in the media about how a Religious Left is rising. But there is also little evidence that such a movement is being organized. A few years ago, a faux Religious Left was manufactured Inside the Beltway. The product didn't sell well, and here we are. But some people who thought that an authentic Religious Left might be a good idea got together and published a book of essays about what it might be like and how to get there.

Rev. Randall Balmer, Mandel Family Professsor of Arts & Sciences at Dartmouth College and chairman of Dartmouth's religion department, recently spoke at Zion Episcopal Church in Manchester, VT and made an important point about the origins of the religious right-wing political movement, as reported by Mark E. Rondeu (@banner_religion) in the Bennington Banner:

It is widely believe that evangelicals turned against Carter and toward the Republicans because of abortion, legalized in the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Balmer calls this "the abortion myth."

Instead he pointed to a lower court ruling which upheld the contention by the Internal Revenue Service that "any organization that engages in racial segregation or racial discrimination is not by definition a charitable organization. Therefore it has no claims on tax-exempt status, and similarly any donations to such an organizations can no longer qualify for tax exemption," Balmer said.

This was used by the IRS in 1975 to rescind the tax exemption of Bob Jones University, a fundamentalist school in Greenvile, S.C., which did not admit African Americans to the student body until 1971 and until 1975, out of fears of racial mixing, did not admit unmarried African Americans.

"That is what got people like Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and the other leaders of the religious right activated as political players in order to reverse those actions against these schools," he said. "That was the catalyst for the Religious Right. Abortion did not become part of the religious right agenda until 1979."

the Republican party in Indiana appears to have amended the state criminal code to either make it a crime, or confirm that it remain a crime, for clergy to conduct weddings for gay couples......The amendment to the criminal code, which will go into effect on July 1, 2014, makes it a misdemeanor, punishable by up to 180 days in jail and a fine of $1,000 for clergy “solemnize” a marriage of two men or two women.

IC 31-11-11-7 Solemnization of marriage between persons prohibited from marrying
Sec. 7. A person who knowingly solemnizes a marriage of individuals who are prohibited from marrying by IC 31-11-1 commits a Class B misdemeanor.As added by P.L.1-1997, SEC.3.

Today begins the Faith & Freedom Coalition‘s three-day “Road to Majority” conference, designed to bring millions of evangelicals to the polls next year. But hidden away in today’s agenda is a massive lobbying effort including hundreds of Tea Party evangelicals knocking on the doors of their U.S. Senators and Congressmen today, demanding a replacement law for what everyone expects to be a Supreme Court ruling that DOMA is unconstitutional.

In the contest in North Carolina between U.S. Senate candidates Elizabeth Colbert Busch (D, pictured) and former Gov. Mark Sanford (R), the Republican Party might have a problem: Republican women voters might stay at home on election day.

For the first time in decades, Julie Bell of Hilton Head Island might sit out an election and not vote.

“I’m 50 years old and I always vote. I believe it’s important,” said Bell, a Republican activist and former member of the Beaufort County School Board who has decided not to support GOP nominee Mark Sanford in his bid for the 1st Congressional District seat. “But I never had such a moral conflict before on supporting the Republican candidate

Howard Phillips, the...founding father of the religious right, has died......As the story goes Phillips, Paul Weyrich, and Richard Viguerie got together in the late 1970s using Viguerie’s groundbreaking direct mail company to help Jerry Falwell build the Moral Majority and Paul and Judy Brown build the American Life League.* While Weyrich, Vigerie and the Browns were Catholic, Falwell was a Baptist, and Phillips was an evangelical convert from Judaism with great affection for RJ Rushdoony and Christian Reconstructionist leanings.

It’s hard to overstate Phillips’ influence in the transformation of the more secular mid-century conservatism of Barry Goldwater and William F. Buckley into today’s religiously-inflected conservatism.

*Of this meeting, Richard Viguerie--today a Tea Party movement leader--writes:

For about nine years in the mid 1970’s, a small group (8-10) of national conservative leaders who became known as the “New Right” began meeting for breakfast at my home near Washington to plan and implement conservative strategy. And, for a period of time, we would reconvene at my home for dinner with the same breakfast group, but now with some New Right young congressmen.

If there ever was something resembling Hillary Clinton’s vast right wing conspiracy, this was it.

At those Wednesday meetings, and many hundreds of other meetings, Howard and the other New Right leaders began to develop and implement the strategies to put conservatives on a path of aggressive opposition to big-government politicians that is today best embodied by Tea Party constitutional conservatives.

Retiring Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, on Thursday shared a theory as to why Republicans aren't lining up to run for his soon-to-be open Senate seat. They are intimidated, Harkin said -- and not by the Democratic opposition.

"The religious right and the tea party people in Iowa have so cowed the moderates in the Republican Party that moderate Republicans are afraid to step forward," Harkin told Hotline On Call. "Because they know they'll get creamed in a primary."

Harkin, who spoke enthusiastically of Rep. Bruce Braley, D-Iowa, the de facto Democratic nominee, nonetheless said the Iowa GOP has plenty of strong potential candidates capable of beating Braley in November. But he doubts any of them would be acceptable to a party base that, in his view, favors ideological purity over electability.

We all know that this country was founded on religious freedom, but we also know that many Christians of the nation wish to rewrite history to make it seem as if we were founded upon Judeo-Christian values. Not so. The Treaty of Tripoli says, and I quote:

“The United States government is in no way founded upon the Christian religion.”

But tell that to Arizona Republicans, who have introduced a bill that would require high school graduates to take an oath that includes the words “so help me God.” In other words, if you’re an atheist, you have to proclaim belief in God to graduate high school. Unbelievable in 2013, in a country that was founded upon religious freedom, right?

There was a time when Rev. Samuel Rodriguez was one of the darlings Inside the Beltway. He was one of the new moderate evangelicals who were said to be displacing the bad old Christian Right; ringing-in the end of the culture wars; and inaugurating a shining new era of common ground.

But it was not to be.

Much of what was touted as moderation, was not. The epitome of this was Rick Warren, who was cast as the new Billy Graham. But as it turned out, he was a Christian Right Republican partisan; an anti-gay marriage leader, who later lied about it on Larry King Live; a creationist; held to extreme Austrian school economic views; and was supportive of anti-gay legislation in Africa, until he was exposed and forced into changing his position.

It is striking how, despite blaming the party for ignoring their pleas against Romney, many leaders and activists on the Christian right fundamentally identify themselves with the GOP. The social-conservative project now, as much as ever, lives and dies on the fate of Republicans at the polls. Just as much of the conservative commentariat has begun calling for the party to put on a PR campaign for Latino voters, often referring to them as “natural Republicans,” conservative Christians have begun speaking of Hispanic-Americans as social conservatives who just don’t know it yet. Social conservatives believe the GOP will need them to reach out to socially conservative minority voters, a project that will both shore up the Christian right’s place in the party and bring in new bodies to vote for its agenda.

If the religious right has not reconsidered its symbiotic relationship with Republicans, it also remains convinced that its message maintains a broad appeal to the American electorate. There is a blatant contradiction here: they acknowledge a seismic cultural shift is shaking the ground beneath their coalition, but seem to believe this deep structural change can be addressed with little more than a recalibrated message.